STITCH – Cultural Heritage, Storytelling, Intelligent Technologies

STITCH understands cultural heritage from the perspective of critical heritage studies, focusing on the of the development of cultural heritage processes (heritagisation) instead of specific practices or objects. Cultural heritage is not given, but negotiated by groups of people in specific social contexts and assigning meaning to tangible or intangible objects through stories. Our focus on place-based cultural heritage will narrow down this approach: places connected to heritage in the widest sense of the word, provide a vehicle and reference point for those involved in corresponding narratives. In a novel approach that integrates spatial sociology into cultural narratology, we assess exclusion in place-based heritagisation and co-create strategies to counteract it. Bottom-up heritagisation measures will facilitate the exchange of cultural heritage stories between people, communities and third parties, hereby conveying a sense of identity and of being
heard for minorities and disregarded people. To enable bottom-up heritagisation and provide new social science research tools, we will develop digital storytelling technologies as a new way of creating, accessing, incentivising and reproducing un(der)heard narrative contents connected to specific places. The aim is to strengthen social cohesion by giving a voice to those whose perspective is underrepresented in dominant narratives connected to cultural heritage. To avoid merely a reproduction of content, context-, emotion- and culture-conscious indicators are gathered from both story creators and consumers. An emotionally and contextually intelligent evaluation of the individual’s interaction with the material at hand encourages further interaction with stories and integrates recommender systems as well as mobile and cloud technologies. This R&I approach will be validated in three case studies (Germany, Denmark, Romania) representing diverse levels of urbanity, socio-cultural contexts and consequently different narrative cultures.

REM Consult supported Neubrandenburg University of Applied Sciences in the project development and participates in the proposal as designated dissemination and communication partner.